The problem with all these “oughts” is that they eventually confront the principle ought implies can. Can the desired end (improving the welfare of the poor, for example) be achieved by the chosen means (income “redistribution”)? If not, then what does the “ought” really mean? “Oughts” without “cans”–ethical pronouncements without economics–are likely to lead to disastrous public policies.

In exploring the relationship between economics and ethics, we can start with two definitions that seem relevant here. The economist David Prychitko once defined economics as “the art of putting parameters on our utopias.” And in a particularly insightful definition, Nobel laureate F. A. Hayek wrote that “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” What both definitions suggest is that economics deals with the realm of the possible and in doing so demarcates the limits to what should be imaginable. Before we say we “ought” to do something, perhaps we should be sure we can do it, in the sense that the action is likely to achieve the intended ends. Put differently: ought implies can.

Ethicists can imagine all kinds of schemes to remedy perceived social ills, but none of the aspiring benefactors can afford to ignore economic analysis. Being able to dream something doesn’t guarantee it is possible. Too often ethical pronouncements have an air of hubris about them, as the pronouncer simply assumes we can do what he says we ought to do. By contrast, economics demands some humility. We always have to ask whether it’s humanly possible to do what the ethicists say we ought. To say we ought to do something we cannot do, in the sense that it won’t achieve our end, is to engage in a pointless exercise. If we cannot do it, to say that we ought to is to command the impossible.

So contrary to the commonly heard complaint, it is not that economists ignore ethical issues. Rather we attempt to describe the likely results of putting particular ethical rules into practice. For example, someone can argue that a living wage is an ethical imperative, but that doesn’t change the economic analysis of minimum-wage laws. Those laws increase unemployment and/or lead to reductions in nonmonetary forms of compensation among all unskilled workers, but especially the young, male, and nonwhite. No matter how much we think we ought to pass such legislation as a way of helping the poor, the reality remains that economics shows us that we cannot help them that way. Those who argue we ought to have such a law can still pass it if they want, but they should do it with eyes wide open to the fact that it will not achieve the result they wish, no matter how much they think we ought to have it.

It might be more accurate to say that ethicists ignore economics than that economists ignore ethics. To the extent that good economics shows what we can and cannot do with social policy, it is engaged with ethics. After all, if the point of saying we ought to do X is that we think it will achieve some set of morally desirable goals, then knowing whether or not doing X will actually achieve those goals is, or at least should be, a key part of moral inquiry. One of the tasks that economists should set for themselves is to engage in this sort of dialogue with moral philosophers and others who argue from “oughts.” Economist Leland Yeager’s recent book Ethics as Social Science is a good example of how economics can inform ethical questions just this way.

Studying “Ought,” Ignoring “Can”

The more interesting question is the degree to which moral philosophers are engaged with economics as they develop their theories. It might be true that introductory economics courses do not consider moral questions as often as they might, but it would seem at least as true that courses in ethics and religious studies are unlikely to confront either economic arguments or economic data that relate to their subjects. Exploring the “ought” without broaching the “can” will not get one far in designing policies that will achieve the intended results. One exception to this neglect of economics is the philosopher Daniel Shapiro’s Is the Welfare State Justified? In that book he brings to bear a good deal of empirical data and economic theory on the question of whether the welfare state can do what its proponents claim for it. From the philosophy side, this is the kind of work that needs to be done.

Can Doesn’t Imply Ought

Once we recognize the insight behind “ought implies can,” we can see that the reverse is true as well. Just as we cannot do everything people say we ought, we ought not do everything we can. We see this in the frequent calls for political actors to “do something” in the face of a crisis. There are many things politicians can actually do in a crisis, and doing them is often fairly easy, especially if the politicians can generate a climate of fear to help make the “ought” seem more pressing. But the fact that they can do something does not always mean they ought to. Even if it is true that “yes we can,” understanding the unseen and unintended consequences of what politicians are able to do should help us to decide whether they ought to do it.

Both ways of looking at “ought implies can” put economists in the position of throwing cold water on the plans and designs of social engineers left and right. This is what Prychitko and Hayek mean. Economists are thus often seen as only knocking down the ideas of others without coming up with solutions of their own. There is some truth to this claim. That is how economists spend much of their time. But it’s an important function: showing why a proposed solution would only make matters worse is a valuable contribution to the broader process of solving the problem.

More relevant, however, is that economics teaches us that solutions are much more often found in the actions of individuals and organizations responding entrepreneurially to the situations they face. The notion of a top-down solution to any social problem is going to attract the economist’s critical eye. In terms of “ought implies can,” economists are often reluctant to say what everyone ought to do because no one person or group knows what people can do. If ought implies can, and “can” is particular people in particular contexts developing solutions to their problems, then it is difficult to say what we all ought to do, especially in a crisis. This is the way that Prychitko’s and Hayek’s definitions cash out in the real world.

All the themes above have been on display in the current economic crisis. The bailout of the financial sector is a classic example of both letting the “ought” blot out the “can” and of assuming we ought to do whatever apparently can be done. The original promise of the bailout was that government would buy up the bad assets of troubled financial institutions then later resell the assets, making the real cost substantially less than the original $700 billion. Many critics, including many economists, suggested not only that this plan was counterproductive–because it only enhanced the likelihood that other firms would take unwise risks in the future–but also that the availability of those funds would lead to demands for the government to use them in other equally unproductive ways. That is more or less what has happened, as the bailout expanded to partial government ownership of banks and then demands from the auto and insurance companies to get in on the goodies. The plan changed again when the government announced it wouldn’t purchase troubled assets but instead would inject money directly into banks and other kinds of businesses. But soon all the “oughts” were crashing against the limits of what can be done via government intervention. Meanwhile, the machinery of government did many things it can do–borrow and create money, for example–without the planners thinking very much about whether they ought to do any of those things.

Social scientists who disregard ethical issues abandon one of their central roles in bettering the human condition, and ethicists who ignore social science in formulating their moral prescriptions are negligent for not asking whether those solutions will achieve their stated ends. Only when both realize that ought implies can will we get public policies based on an accurate understanding of human interaction.

We still suffer today from a big “but” problem. Even many friends of freedom are afflicted with the “but” syndrome. One example of this is the welfare state. “Sure, it would be preferable if individuals planned their own retirement and health-care needs rather than having government manage and manipulate these things, but . . .” “Of course it would be better if individuals were more self-responsible in taking care of the uncertainties and occasional tragedies that may impinge on life, but . . .” “Without a doubt it would be better if we could count on people to help their fellow men in time of need without state action, but . . .”

The “but” often arises because that person is not confident that a system of freedom would “really work” in one of these corners of social and economic life. Or it may arise because the individual thinks that in the climate of current public opinion most people will not accept a fully free system. So it is better to make the case for a supposedly partial private solution, it is said.

Part of this lack of confidence in freedom comes from the loss of historical memory. There is little understanding of how many of the “social problems” that confront members of a community successfully had their solutions either in the marketplace or through various other forms of voluntary association before government co-opted them through the modern welfare state.

For example, in nineteenth-century Great Britain many of these welfare-state “functions” were provided by a network of mutual-assistance associations known as “friendly societies.” At first they provided insurance for the cost of funerals for workers or their family members. But by the middle of the century, they expanded their coverage to include: accident insurance that provided weekly allowances for the families of workers who were injured on the job; medical insurance that covered the cost of health care and medicines for workers and their families; and life insurance and assistance for keeping a family intact in case of the breadwinner’s death. And by the end of the century the friendly societies offered fire insurance and savings-and-loan services so members could buy homes.

Indeed, by 1910, the year before Parliament passed Britain’s first National Insurance Act, around three-quarters of the entire British workforce was covered by these private, voluntary insurance associations. Membership in the friendly societies covered the entire income spectrum, with those at the lower income ranges most highly subscribed. They also offered public lectures for members and their families on self-responsibility and the moral value of voluntarism over government compulsion.

What the modern welfare state did in the twentieth century was to undermine these free-market methods for providing what is now referred to as “social  services.” The introduction of state regulation of the friendly societies, as well as the British government’s “free” national health and insurance services and the many new taxes to cover their cost, all resulted in crowding out the voluntary, market-based alternatives of the private sector.

We also need to relearn the successes of private charity and philanthropy in the glory days of classical liberalism. During the middle and late decades of the nineteenth century the state was not regarded as either the proper or most efficient vehicle for the amelioration of poverty. Especially for the Christian classical liberal in Great Britain, his faith required him to take on the personal responsibility for the saving of souls for God.

Most of these Christians also believed that to help a man in his rebirth in Christ, it was essential to help him improve his earthly life as well. Soup kitchens for the hungry, shelters for the homeless, job training for the unskilled, care for the abandoned or poverty-stricken young, and nurturing of a sense of self-respect and self-responsibility were all seen as complements to the primary task of winning sinners over for salvation.

By the 1890s most middle-class British families devoted 10 percent or more of their income to charitable work, an outlay from the average family’s income second only to expenditures on food. Total voluntary giving in Great Britain was larger than the entire budgets of several European governments; and half a million women worked as full-time volunteers for charitable organizations such as the Salvation Army.

A vital advantage to this world of private charity was that it enabled innovation and experimentation to discover the better means to assist people in their spiritual needs and material conditions. At the same time, the competition among charities for voluntary contributions rewarded those organizations that demonstrated the greater effectiveness of the methods they used, and weeded out the less successful ones.

As the government began to create the welfare state, many of these private charities found it increasingly difficult to compete with the “free” services supplied by the state. At the same time, the higher taxes to fund these government welfare programs reduced the financial ability of many people to contribute as much to charities as they had in the past.

Not only have we lost our historical memory about these private solutions to supposed social problems, we are ignorant about what the private charitable sector does even with the welfare state and the heavy burden of taxation. In 2003, Americans contributed over $240 billion to charitable causes. Almost 75 percent of this total was given by individuals (the rest by foundations, bequests, or corporations). Americans not only contribute their money, they also give of their time. Forty-four percent of the U.S. population did volunteer work for charitable causes in 2000, on average over 15 hours per month.

No Need for the Welfare State

There is no need for the welfare state, in any shape or to any degree. It is the market economy–through innovation, investment, capital formation, and the profit motive–that is raising a growing percentage of humanity out of the poverty that has been man’s tragic condition during most of his time on earth. It is the free and responsible individual who can be relied on to manifest the moral sense to assist those who may need some help to become self-supporting men and women.

More deeply, there is the fundamental issue of freedom versus coercion. No compromise is possible with the welfare state without abridging the individual’s right to his life and property, and his freedom of choice. Government has only one means of funding the welfare state—compulsory taxation for redistribution of income and wealth. This has nothing to do with government as mere guardian of each person’s liberty against aggression.

Indeed, the welfare state abrogates the individual’s ability to act on his moral precepts by extracting from him the financial means out of which he could have made such decisions. It therefore denies him the potential of more fully acting as an ethical being.

It may very well be true that many of our fellow citizens are not yet ready intellectually or emotionally for the uncompromising and principled case for liberty. They have lived too long under the propaganda of the welfare state and have become used to taking for granted their dependency on government largess. But how will the spell of welfare statism ever be broken if those who see more clearly the logic and potential of the free society do not present to the best of their ability the principles and possibilities of freedom? The alternative is to continue sinking in that sea of “buts.”

Jansson starts out innocently enough, writing, “I began this research with the suspicion that Americans had made numerous errors in their priorities from the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt through Bill Clinton.” Virtually any well-read American can point to government blunders in the allocation of resources, and from the book’s title, you might suppose that the author is about to pitch into the tremendous waste that we have seen in federal farm subsidy programs, housing programs, welfare, education meddling, and so forth.

But no–Jansson is a professor of “social work” at the University of Southern California, and his complaint is not with those familiar boondoggles. Instead, he is upset that our “national priorities” have not matched his utopian dreams.

In an interview distributed by Columbia University Press, Jansson was asked, “How can a non-economist, non-military expert, non-budget expert intelligently criticize budget decisions of various Presidents and Congresses?” To which he answered, “To the research and recommendations of these experts, I have added value judgments.” Politicians, it hardly need be said, are not “experts,” but Jansson’s “value judgments” for the most part reflect a socialistic mindset that uncritically accepts the efficacy of government at solving “social problems” and looks askance at free enterprise.

As a long-time taxpayer activist, I believe that the money Americans earn is theirs to do with as they choose. Jansson’s view is just the opposite: “Failed priorities stem from misguided tax rates at excessively low levels, thereby depleting the resources available for military or domestic programs.” He grumbles that “members of Congress have often curried favor with voters by cutting taxes, even though they needed money to address domestic or international needs.” In short, what Jansson gives us is the old Galbraithian argument that we are starving the public sector by leaving so much money in private hands. The sixteen-trillion-dollar mistake, in his mind, is that the government hasn’t grown far bigger than it is!

Looking back into history, Jansson argues that FDR failed to raise taxes high enough to adequately fund the New Deal. “Historians often portray the New Deal as mammoth,” he writes, “but it had relatively few resources.” Jansson here is entirely oblivious of the well-argued case that the New Deal was a great hindrance to the economy’s recovery. He just takes it as an article of “liberal” faith that increased government spending would have done more to “stimulate” the economy and boost employment.

The author also echoes the jaded leftist cry that corporations are undertaxed. The problem here is that people who study the economics of taxation have generally concluded that the incidence of taxation doesn’t fall on corporations, but instead falls on customers, workers, and stockholders.

Jansson argues that higher taxes would give the government more revenues for all those programs that the left holds sacred–Head Start, Medicare, welfare, foreign aid, and more–while not affecting productivity. He thinks it a myth that high taxes stifle the economy and lead to rising unemployment, but never comes to grips with the argument of serious economists that by siphoning resources from the private sector, the government necessarily reduces industry’s ability to employ people and produce goods and services. It never occurs to Jansson to compare the economic performance of high-tax and low-tax nations.

Some of his complaints are well-taken, especially on corporate welfare, but others have done better work in identifying the waste.

There is little to be learned from this feeble book except that limited-government scholarship and basic economics still have not penetrated far into academia–especially schools of “social work.”

Donald Racheter is professor of political science at Central (Iowa) College and president of Public Interest Institute.

Reviewed by Martin Morse Wooster

One of the major triumphs of liberty in the 1990s was in welfare reform. In the 1980s, scholars—notably Charles Murray—who contended that welfare demeaned those who accepted it and ensured lifetimes of dependence on the dole were condemned as mean-spirited extremists. But that view is now the consensus.

Although socialists are in retreat, they have not been totally routed, as political scientists Benjamin I. Page and James R. Simmons show in What Government Can Do. Page, who teaches at Northwestern, and Simmons of the University of Wisconsin (Oshkosh) have prepared a treatise that provides comfort to the statist and a bitter pill for lovers of freedom.

“We find,” they write, “that government can act effectively and that it can do so in ways that can serve economic efficiency, contribute to economic growth, and preserve individual liberty, while at the same time reducing poverty and enhancing equality.”

Page and Simmons support all of the programs created during the New Deal and the Great Society. They argue that the problems of the welfare state can be solved by raising taxes on the wealthy and then channeling the additional taxes into expanded welfare state programs. Except for farm subsidies to large corporations, they would maintain or expand all welfare programs.

In the authors’ view, the solution to every social problem is to give the government more money. Social Security and Medicare’s impending bankruptcy? To them, that’s an accounting fiction that can be fixed by raising Social Security taxes on the well-to-do. Collapsing schools? Teachers aren’t paid enough. People on the dole for decades? Raise the amount they are given.

Moreover, Page and Simmons want to expand the welfare state in two areas. They consider, and reject, the notion of a guaranteed national income, but support a national “right” to housing, health care, and food. They call for Washington to establish a “food card” so that everyone from Bill Gates to a homeless drunk will be entitled to a food ration. They also want the government to establish a network of medical clinics for the poor, as a prelude to nationalized health care. It’s unabashed old-style socialism.

The authors also want the state to reduce income inequality through punitive taxation on the rich. “Everyone should be helped to have the same expected future income at every point in life,” they write.

But the evidence Page and Simmons use to advance their case is the research of other political and social scientists. This leads to a book so dull that the authors frequently tell their readers to skip over large sections.

Their citations are, of course, selective. They claim that Head Start is a resounding success, using as evidence two small decades-old studies that have never been replicated. They claim that teachers would be eager to work in inner-city schools if they were paid more, but they ignore the mountain of evidence (collected in such books as Susan Moore Johnson’s Teachers at Work) that most teachers quit not because of pay, but because of mind-numbing bureaucracy.

Page and Simmons contend that the poor primarily suffer from a lack of income. But if the problems of poverty were only about money, we would have conquered poverty decades ago. As the old joke goes, we fought a War on Poverty in the 1960s—and poverty won. That’s because the problems of the poor are primarily moral and spiritual, not economic. A government check cannot teach a poor person to dress for a job interview, or how to show up for work every day, or how to refrain from insulting the boss on the job.

As for inequality, as Michael Novak argues, it’s better to make the poor richer than the rich poorer. One way to do this is to remove regulatory barriers that prevent the poor from starting their own enterprises and keep them from obtaining employment. Alas, it never occurs to the authors that less government might enable the poor to succeed without state coercion. And they never trouble themselves to discuss nongovernmental alternatives or the terrible disincentive problems of the welfare state.

What Government Can Do is a weak and unpersuasive book that inadvertently shows that less government, not more, is the best way to help the poor become responsible, productive, and prosperous.

Martin Wooster is an associate editor of The American Enterprise and the author of Return to Charity: Philanthropy and the Welfare State.

And yet my advice is (to quote the late Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), “Don’t Panic!” You should, in fact, take all such accounts with a very large pinch of salt: not only because they frequently contain elementary errors of fact, logic, and argument, but also for a more profound reason. Not only is it likely that in many or most cases there is no problem (or much less of one than the prophets of doom would have us believe)—in most instances the “problem” is diminishing and is actually on the way to disappearing. The accounts of social crisis that bombard us from every corner are examples of a principle I propose to call “Spencer’s Law,” after the man who first formulated it, the great Victorian philosopher and sociologist Herbert Spencer.

Spencer’s Law states, “The degree of public concern and anxiety about a social problem or phenomenon varies inversely as to its real or actual incidence.” In plain English this means that when a social problem is genuinely widespread and severe it will attract little notice or discussion. It will only become the object of attention, concern, and controversy precisely when it is in decline and its severity is diminishing. So the less of a problem there is, the more that is written about it! Spencer made this point on several occasions, perhaps most pointedly toward the end of his life in his essay of 1891 “From Freedom to Bondage,” remarking on “the way the more things improve the louder become the exclamations about their badness.”¹ The point of course is that complaints about social problems that are actually on the way out have a long history. In the work cited and elsewhere Spencer gives several examples:

Drink. In the early nineteenth century Britain suffered from a truly horrendous drink problem. Alcohol abuse was commonplace and a major cause of ill health and crime. By the 1880s consumption of alcohol had declined sharply and there had been a marked shift from hard liquor to beer. However, it was the years after 1880 that saw an upsurge in temperance campaigns in both Britain and the United States, culminating in the “noble experiment” of Prohibition in the United States and restrictive licensing laws in Britain.

Education. In the late eighteenth century illiteracy was frequent and innumeracy and ignorance were so common that they attracted no attention. By the 1860s the huge majority of British were literate and numerate and there was strong demand for popular educational materials.² The later nineteenth century saw a campaign against the “public ignorance,” which led to the establishment of compulsory state education at the primary (1870) and secondary (1902) levels.

Poverty. By every single indicator (such as average income, cost of living, conditions of life, number on poor relief) the condition of working people in Britain was far better in 1870 than it had been in 1840. This was well known, as shown in the statistical works produced at that time, such as Porter’s State of the Nation. It was the years after 1870 that saw the “discovery of poverty” through the works of men like Rowntree and Booth and the growth of an intellectual and political movement that led to the creation of the welfare state in Britain.

The status and treatment of women and children. Spencer pointed out on several occasions that women and children enjoyed more rights and were better treated in the nineteenth century than at any other time in history. Yet the years after 1850 saw the growth of feminism and the appearance of the first campaigns against child labor and cruelty to children.

More Cases

To Spencer’s examples we can add:

Pollution and the state of the environment. Contrary to popular belief pollution is steadily declining and the quality of the environment has improved since 1900.³

Poverty. This is less of a problem for much of the world than at any time in history, and the long-term trend is for absolute poverty to decline everywhere. In fact, all indicators of human well-being show a steady rise over the last hundred years.

So how do we explain Spencer’s Law? Why do we become exercised by social problems precisely when they are in decline or much diminished? One reason is lack of historical perspective—most people do not know of the comparison between the present and the past and so are unaware of the trend. They only see the problems today without realizing how much worse it was in the past.

Second, there is a problem of perception. When a phenomenon such as poverty, child labor, or mistreatment of women is widespread, it is not noticed, but simply taken for granted as part of “the way things are.” When, however, such phenomena become rare or exceptional they stand out more by contrast and so attract attention. As the problem becomes less commonplace, attitudes change from (at best) resigned acceptance to outraged rejection.

Finally, there is a basic fact of human psychology: Bad news sells while good news does not; gloomy pessimism seems to have an appeal lacking in sunny optimism.

This explains why accounts that present a declining problem as acute and worsening are believed or found plausible. However, they do not fully explain why such accounts are produced in the first place. In addition to the above factors, two others come into play.

First, people who are concerned about a problem or issue and want to do something about it now realize that they have to present their message in a certain way if it is to have any impact. “Situation improving, a bit more needed” does not excite in the way that “situation desperate—urgent attention required” does.

Also, such accounts often have a specific agenda. In contrast to Spencer’s time, when many social activists called primarily for self-improvement and private (non-state) action, such as philanthropy or mutual aid, modern campaigns typically call for an increase in the power of government. Instead of arguing that processes such as economic growth, which reduce social problems, should be allowed to take their course or be encouraged, or calling for action by individuals or voluntary cooperation, they advocate some kind of collective action via politics; that is, through legislation and the state. The evidence suggests that this will be at best ineffective, at worse counterproductive. However, in many cases the “problem” is being used as an excuse for advocating something that is wanted for other, philosophical reasons.

Experience has taught advocates of power that to openly advocate increasing the size of government is to court defeat. Much easier to describe a “terrible problem” and argue that government action is the only solution.

That is the final lesson to draw from this. In all the examples of Spencer’s Law there is a common feature. These are all cases where things are improving without resort to planned, collective action.

In Spencer’s own time living conditions were improving, levels of education were rising, and the problem of drink was diminishing, as a result of orderly yet unplanned social processes. These desirable trends were the unplanned outcome of many millions of actions and decisions made by individuals. Even where there was conscious action (as in the case of charities or mutual aid) it was piecemeal, localized, and diffuse. Many people, then and now, simply find it difficult to accept that improvement or social reform can come about except by conscious, collective action, by using power to direct people’s affairs.

Does this mean we should simply sit back, believing like Doctor Pangloss that “All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds”? Not at all. In the first place we should all be looking to do what we can to make matters better in our own sphere, by practicing the virtues of personal responsibility.

Second, there is a role for public policy. The benevolent trends identified by Spencer and contemporary authors such as Stephen Moore and the late Julian Simon can only exist and continue in the right institutional framework.⁴ Get the “rules of the game” wrong and all that improvement will stop or go into reverse. The irony, as Spencer pointed out, is that when government grows in response to panics and jeremiads, that is usually just what happens. The growth of state action in response to misleading panics is often self-defeating. Frequently, the outcome is to actually diminish or even reverse the previous beneficent trend. This can be seen most clearly in education, where the rise of state schooling has brought about a decline in general knowledge, literacy, and capacity for critical reasoning. Similarly, controls on the sale of alcohol actually made drinking problems worse.

The role of law and government should be to create the right conditions for human ingenuity and good-spiritedness to do its work.

Notes

1. Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State, With Six Essays on Government, Society, and Freedom (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1981), p. 487.
2. E. G. West, Education and the Industrial Revolution (London: Batsford, 1975) and Education and the State (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1970).
3. Julian L. Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2 (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 335–40.
4. Julian L. Simon and Stephen Moore, It’s Getting Better All the Time: 100 Greatest Trends of the Last 100 Years (Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 2000) and Julian L. Simon, ed., The State of Humanity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).

Service has a long and venerable history in America. And so it continues today. Three-quarters of American households give to charity. An incredible 90 million adults volunteer, the value of their time approaches $200 billion.

However, some people have long desired to involve government. Eight decades ago William James wrote of the need for a “moral equivalent of war,” in which all young men would be conscripted to work for the community. He argued that “the martial virtues, although originally gained by the race through war, are absolute and permanent human goods,” and that national service would provide a method for instilling those same values in peacetime. Anachronistic though his vision may seem today, his rhetoric has become the touchstone for national service advocates. In succeeding decades a host of philosophers, policy analysts, and politicians proffered their own proposals for either voluntary or mandatory national service.

Some of these initiatives have been turned into law, most recently the National and Community Service Trust Act, which established the Corporation for National and Community Service. So far it has survived the supposed wave of budget-cutting in Washington.

Service is obviously a good thing, which is why so many people give time and money. The issue, however, is service to whom and organized by whom?

Americans have worked in their communities since the nation’s founding and opportunities for similar kinds of service today abound. Much more could be done, of course. But what makes service in America so vital is that it is decentralized, privately organized, centered around perceived needs, and an outgrowth of people’s sense of duty and compassion. Mandating service risks teaching that the duty of giving, and the job of organizing giving (deciding who is worthy to receive public grants and, indirectly, private groups’ services) belongs to government rather than to average people throughout society. This is, in fact, the explicit goal of advocates of mandatory service programs, who would create a duty to the State rather than the supposed beneficiaries.

Some participants in service organizations share this fear. David King of the Ohio-West Virginia YMCA has warned: “The national service movement and the National Corporation are not about encouraging volunteering or community service. The national service movement is about institutionalizing federal funding for national and community service. It is about changing the language and understanding of service to eliminate the words `volunteer’ and `community service’ and in their place implant the idea that service is something paid for by the government.”

A second problem is that government service programs treat “public” service as inherently better than private service. This bias is reflected in the fact that 2,800 of the first 20,000 AmeriCorps participants were assigned to federal agencies. For instance, the Department of the Interior used AmeriCorps workers to “update geological and hydrological information for the U.S. Geological Survey” and restore wetlands and wildlife habitat. However respectable such work, it is like any other government employment and is not likely to promote volunteerism around the country.

Equally important is the concern over whether taxpayers are likely to get their money’s worth from the service provided. No doubt some good work has been done by AmeriCorps volunteers; it is hard for even the government to spend hundreds of millions of dollars without doing some good. But there is no guarantee that taxpayer-funded “service” will be worth its cost.

Even attractive-sounding jobs won’t necessarily produce much social benefit. The Corporation and its supporters speak grandly of meeting current “unmet social needs.” But as long as human wants are unlimited, the real number of unfilled social “needs,” as well as unmet business “needs,” is infinite. Labor, however, is not a free resource. Thus, it simply isn’t worthwhile to satisfy most of these “unmet” needs. Trade-offs must be made, yet national service treats some jobs, especially public ones, as sacrosanct while ignoring other, disfavored tasks.

Of course, much worthwhile service work remains to be done across the country. But government often stands in the way of private individuals and groups who want to help. Minimum-wage laws effectively forbid the hiring of dedicated but unskilled people. Restrictions on paratransit operations limit private transportation for the disabled. Government regulations also harm other forms of volunteerism. Health department codes prevent restaurants in Los Angeles and elsewhere from donating food to the hungry, for instance. In short, many important needs are left unmet precisely because of perverse government policy.

To the extent that serious social problems remain, narrowly targeted responses will likely be the most effective. That is, it would be better to find a way to attract a few people to help care for the terminally ill than to lump that task in with teaching, changing light bulbs, administrative work, private fundraising, political organizing, and the multitude of other jobs now performed by tens of thousands of AmeriCorps employees. So far the program has had decidedly mixed results. Among the dubious successes and apparent flops: in California, English classes were canceled for lack of interest and a health-care fair was badly bungled; volunteers in one Florida program complained that they were used for publicity purposes; AmeriCorps members involved with the Georgia Peach Corps spent much of their time training, traveling, and playing computer games; participants in one Baltimore program provided condom education; Northeastern University won money for an initiative to promote athletics; the Green Corps devoted 55 participants to “training the next generation of environmental leaders”; and more.

Corporation personnel also may be more interested in working off a school debt than “serving.” AmeriCorps members typically receive benefits of roughly $13,000—actually a bit higher in effect, since the educational voucher and other fringe benefits are not taxed. As a result, “service” is a better financial deal than many entry-level jobs. Some participants admit that they see national service as a financially remunerative job option, not a unique opportunity to help the community. Indeed, much of President Clinton’s pitch during the 1992 campaign was framed in terms of naked self-interest: earning credit towards college tuition.

The Corporation has also politicized the notion of service. It funded the ACORN housing program, inextricably linked with ACORN, a partisan, left-wing organization. In Denver, the Cole Coalition forced AmeriCorps members to draft and distribute political fliers. Federally funded “volunteers” were bused to an Earth Day rally in Havre de Grace, Maryland, last year. The Arizona Border Volunteer Corps used an AmeriCorps-funded newsletter to encourage its members to lobby for the program.

What we need instead of government-funded “service” is a renewed commitment to individual service. People, in community with one another, need to help meet the many serious social problems that beset us. There is a role for government: officials should commit themselves to a strategy of “first, do not harm.” We need to eliminate public programs that discourage personal independence and self-responsibility, disrupt and destroy communities and families, and hinder the attempts of people and groups to respond to problems around them. But the private activism that follows needs neither oversight nor subsidy from Uncle Sam. America’s strength is its combination of humanitarian impulses, private association, and diversity. We need service, not “national” service.